Recently, William Steele wrote to this blog asking about the latest murder conviction involving Frederick Gude, who killed Mr. Steele’s father in southeast Atlanta (my old neighborhood) in 1969. Gude received a life sentence for that crime but walked out of prison a mere eight years later — eight years for taking a life. He was sent up again in 1983, got out again, then killed a second time. For that “voluntary manslaughter,” Gude was sentenced to five years. He walked out of prison for a third time in September 2003, then four months later he stabbed his girlfriend to death with an ice pick. Along the way, he accumulated the usual, heinous, un-prosecuted and under-prosecuted acts of domestic violence, and other serious crimes. Earlier this year, AJC reporter Steve Visser interviewed Gude’s adult daughter, a Marine Lieutenant Colonel who said this of her father:

“There are some people who shouldn’t walk amongst us” [she said] … “This is his third killing. This is the third one that we know of” … [S]he knew her father as a child – when he wasn’t in prison – but her mother quickly left him behind after he was released from prison the first time. He used to beat her mother and he stabbed at least one relative. Violence, she said, was her father’s defining characteristic. “Some people kill in the heat of moment,” the Marine said. “For him, every moment is the heat of the moment, if you say something he doesn’t like.”

Frederick Gude: Three-Time Killer

Run-of-the-mill criminals don’t attract elite legal help, but once you’ve accumulated a body count like Mr. Gude’s, and capital punishment is on the table, the suits show up. For his latest murder defense, Gude secured Atlanta defense attorney Thomas West (on the taxpayer’s dime, undoubtedly).

Thomas West: Not Atticus Finch

Mr. West is one of those defense attorneys who market themselves as civil rights heroes with the assistance of corrupted civil rights groups like the once-storied Southern Christian Leadership Council(SCLC), which long ago stopped doing anything but stealing their donations, accusing each other of stealing, and giving “Drum Major” awards to defense attorneys like West who specialize in returning brute killers back to the communities they victimized before and will victimize again.

For their part, Mr. West and his defense bar peers may fancy themselves modern-day Atticus Finches, but they sure don’t bill in croker-sacks of turnip greens, as the fictional Finch did while helping poor white and black sharecroppers avoid entailment, malnutrition, and lynching.

Today’s defense attorneys deploy sleazy technicalities to help serial predators escape consequences while bleeding taxpayers dry. Or, as West puts it on his website:

Again and again, the law firm is complimented for the intense attention it pays to each detail of a client’s case, and its willingness to explore every legal angle in order to come up with the best possible outcome for each client.

In client Gude’s case, Thomas West obstructed justice for nine years, at a cost of many hundreds of thousands of dollars to taxpayers (and into his pocket). Of course, it takes a village to really obstruct justice, and West had help from many quarters, including Superior Court Judge Thelma Wyatt Cummings Moore, who simply didn’t bother to set a trial date as witnesses died and victims hung in limbo. See here for my previous post on West’s manipulations of the justice system on behalf of Frederick Gude. That was nearly five years ago, and the case just resolved in 2013.

By holding the justice system hostage with a blizzard of pretrial motions on behalf of Frederick Gude, Thomas West finally succeeded in getting Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard to take capital punishment off the table, as Steve Visser reported last February:

District Attorney Paul Howard, who said Gude’s age persuaded him to drop the death penalty request after Gude turned 69 in July, contended that the lengthy wait not only undermined the case, but also cheated the victim’s family and taxpayers. Two key eye witnesses died while awaiting the trial. By the calculation used by the sheriff’s office, housing Gude cost more than a quarter of a million dollars.

“They have a legitimate question to ask Fulton County about why are you taking so long to dispense justice,” Howard said. “This will make the third person he has killed in our county and he is allowed to sit in jail for nine years. It is unconscionable.”

Also unconscionable? Thomas West’s vicious remarks belittling the victim of Gude’s latest crime. West urged the court to go easy on his client, explaining that Gude had done nothing “heinous” because he just stabbed a woman to death with an icepick. Gude’s crime wasn’t a hate crime, you see, because he picked a woman to chop away at forty times (and left her 94-year old aunt locked in a bathroom near the body, where the elderly woman nearly froze to death, but hey, who’s counting?).

“We contended it was cruel and unusual to seek the death penalty in a case where you are just accused of killing your girlfriend and not something more heinous. … In the past, the district attorney has not sought the death penalty in these circumstances.”

“Just killing your girlfriend.” “Not something more heinous.” Some people’s lives are just more valuable than other people’s lives. A murder with the right mix of victim and offender will bring out the activists and the mayor marching around all puffed up with candles in little paper cups. But Gude killed politically insignificant humans using non-heinous icepick torture, so, no heartfelt politician parades for his victims.

Yet despite West’s claim that the murder wasn’t heinous, he acknowledged that the crime scene photos of Gude’s last victim presented some “visual issues” that might have convinced even Fulton County jurors to vote for death.

Visual Issues. Is there any limit to the degradation this man heaps on innocent victims of crime?

Thomas West was enabled in his serial lies about Frederick Gude’s murders by a criminal justice system that has spent sixty years institutionalizing such lies. Words like heinous and hate have been warped beyond recognition in the criminal courts. Unlike criminal investigations and trials in other western nations, our courts have become mechanisms for excluding facts, instead of seeking and weighing them. Criminal justice is treated like a game, instead of the fullest pursuit of truth. And so people like Frederick Gude and Thomas West game the system over and over again, with nary a peep from the tens of thousands of law professors and judges who are supposed to address such travesties.

When the justice system is in such institutionalized disarray that a murder trial can be delayed for nine years while attorneys file motions quarreling about how many thrusts of the icepick count as heinous, or a child rape trial can be delayed for more than a decade while Bob Barr and his peers argue about whether a professional fantasy role-player’s pretend illnesses can get him cut loose from the ankle-bracelet that is keeping him from raping more little boys, it’s time to start talking about whether the problem is something other than over-incarceration.

The worst part, besides the denial of justice, is that we actually pay these jerks to make such arguments.

Appallingly, Mr. West now uses his defense of Frederick Lee Gude as an advertising tool, featuring Gude’s case prominently on his website. Gude will probably start appealing to be released early due to his advanced age any day now, which likely means more money in Thomas West’s pockets. Nice little justice system we’ve got here.

~~~~

If anyone has information about Frederick Gude’s trial or his other crimes, please contact this blog. Identities must be confirmed but will be kept anonymous.

Thanks to Peach Pundit for linking to my logorrhea on healthcare navigation. One of the fun things about being back in Georgia — as opposed to Florida, with its tedious palm trees, balmy beaches, and light traffic — is having an institutional memory of the political scene. I spent twenty years in downtown Atlanta.

Once, when I was new to the city, I got off work around 3 a.m. from my job on the docks of the Georgia World Congress Center. I drove past the Ponce de Leon Krispy Kreme donut shop, which looked way to scary to patronize, and went to an all-night grocery story instead. In the dairy aisle, there was this wired guy who looked like he was coming from an adult costume party: he had on what looked like a sort of mini-cape, with giant epaulets and lots of braid. He had cornered an old woman and was lecturing her on the crucial differences between Jumbo and Large eggs.

Weird, I thought, and crossed the grocery story off my list of places to go to in the middle of the night.

Some time later, I saw the egg man holding a press conference on TV. He was Atlanta Chief of Police (and future Clayton County Commissioner) Eldrin Bell.

Weird, I thought, and crossed Ponce de Leon off my list of ways to drive home from work.

Before I moved to Atlanta in 1988, the only thing I really knew about Georgia was that Jimmy Carter came from there. Or, near there. I’m sorry to say that where I came from, everything south of the Newark existed only vaguely to us. To people in Poughkeepsie, Carter’s drawl, and Miss Lillian, and Billy all seemed as exotic as The Dukes of Hazard. My parents, however, had loved the way the Carters walked to the White House on inauguration day, like ordinary people.

But sadly, there are no ordinary people in politics. This week marks the 35th anniversary of the murder/suicide of some 900 people belonging to the communist cult called Jonestown. Oh, you didn’t know it was a communist cult? Did you know a communist killed JFK? That Sirhan Sirhan, who killed RFK, was a cult hero to the American communist group, The Weather Underground?

Communism was still as common as herpes in the Seventies, something that’s very hard to explain to anyone under sixty today.

The list of politicians who helped Jim Jones create his communist third-world-hellhole-turned-murder-camp is long, weird, and disgraceful. Jonestown wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill cult — it was a racket for stealing welfare and social security benefits from the vulnerable people lured there with the help of politicians like Harvey Milk, whose culpability is conveniently forgotten by those who wish to turn Milk into a martyr because he was openly gay and murdered in office.

Current California Governor Jerry Brown, Walter Mondale and Rosalyn Carter also hobnobbed with Jones, pre-massacre, and Communist Party member Angela Davis used her position as a professor at UCLA to abet Jones in events that led up to the massacre — something the highly-esteemed Dr. Davis does not include in her definitely for-profit speeches to academic audiences today.

The taxpayers of California are currently supporting an entire academic sub-discipline dedicated to Jones: Alternative Considerations of Jonestown and Peoples Temple, aka Jonestown apologetics, is ironically housed in the Department of Religion at San Diego State University. Read my essay about the politicians and academicians involved with Jones here:

Tonight, Cliff Kincaid will be talking about the communists and the JFK assassination on the America’s Survival Roku channel and the online site Kenney TV — watch here on Roku, or live on the internet at 9:00. And for evidence about the Soviets’ involvement in the JFK murder, here is Cliff’s article, Why the Communists Killed Kennedy, which references important work by Ion Mihai Pacepa and Humberto Fontova, two experts who are worth reading on this subject and others.

2011 began with the murder of Deputy Sheriff Suzanne Hopper in Ohio. January 1, Deputy Hopper was shot while photographing a crime scene. She left behind a husband and four children. Another officer was shot but survived.

According to her boss, Sheriff Gene Kelly,

Hopper once went six straight years without calling in sick and often put on charity events for the Special Olympics and other causes . . . Her personnel file is filled with accolades and commendations and always service before self.

[1/24/2011] In just 24 hours, at least 11 officers were shot. The shootings included Sunday attacks at traffic stops in Indiana and Oregon, a Detroit police station shooting that wounded four officers, and a shootout at a Port Orchard, Wash., Wal-Mart that injured two deputies. On Monday morning, two officers were shot dead and a U.S. Marshal was wounded by a gunman in St. Petersburg, Fla. On Thursday, two Miami-Dade, Fla., detectives were killed by a murder suspect they were trying to arrest.

Two years ago, Sgt. Baitinger served as mentor for a student at Gibbs High School. Catherine Smith, the former family and community liaison at Gibbs, said he stood out among the 100 or so mentors who volunteer each year. “Some police officers, you know, seem to have like a hard exterior,” Smith said. “This man was just so nice.” When the sergeant showed up, usually carrying a McDonald’s bag, the student’s face just glowed. “He loved him,” she said. “When that young man came down and saw the sergeant, oh my goodness, it was like he saw his father.” His hobbies were golf and poker.

He is survived by his wife, Lorraine, 40, and his children: Caleb, 12; Haylie, 8; and Calen, 5. He was on his way home after his night shift with his police dog Ace when he responded to a call for backup . . . It was like him to go. Just flip through his personnel file down at the police station. . . The night before he died, Yaslowitz helped his neighbor haul new furniture inside. “He was a great guy, I’ll tell you,” said [Herbert] Kane, 77. “A great father, too, and a great husband. I never heard him even argue, ever. They were a great family and I’m just sick about it.”

To the residents of his well-kept Davie street, fallen Miami-Dade police Detective Roger Castillo was the type of neighbor you wanted to have around. He was the dad you’d see on the front lawn, tossing around a football with his boys. The one who brightened up the cul-de-sac with Christmas lights and inflatables. A helping hand if you were struggling with a fix-it job. “If I’m fixing something, if he passes by, he will ask if I need help, do I need to borrow tools?” said Andre Jean-Louis, a real estate broker . . . On Thursday, as the tragedy unfolded in Liberty City, Castillo’s relatives and neighbors monitored the news and hoped he was safe. Slowly, through phone calls and text messages and hesitant knocks on the door, they learned that their friend was gone. “They stole him,” neighbor Lisa Tuffy said. “He made this world a better place.”

Twenty-three years after she joined the Miami-Dade Police Department, Amanda Lynn Haworth, 44, was fatally wounded, along with another detective — both of them members of an elite team that served arrest warrants on violent suspects. Haworth, a single mother and police detective, loved her job, but was most devoted to her 13-year-old son, her stepmother said. “She took him everywhere she went,” said Diane Haworth, 66. She last spoke with her stepdaughter on Monday, she recalled. “She was just so sweet, so very sweet,” her stepmother said . . . she often played baseball with son, Austin, in their backyard, neighbors said. “Her son and her work were everything to her,” said neighbor Bernardo Gonazalez. She was a big fan of the Weston Red Hawks — the team her son played for — and attended all of his games. “She was just a beautiful, beautiful person,” Gonazalez said.

Why were Amanda Haworth and Roger Castillo killed? Because the justice system failed them. Not once, but a dozen times. Because every previous time police risked their lives capturing the thug who murdered them, some lazy judge or overwhelmed prosecutor let him go:

[Johnny] Simms, 22, had been in trouble since he was a teen. Officers first arrested him at 14, for larceny. In all, Simms was arrested 11 times before he was an adult on charges including burglary and auto theft, state records show. He received house arrest in some cases, while others were dropped. His tattoos mirrored his lifestyle: a gun, flames, and the words “savage” and “10-20 Life.” In October 2005 and December 2005, Simms was arrested for separate armed robberies, one with a pistol and the second with a rifle. Prosecutors did not file charges in either case. In 2007, Simms — who also goes by “Sims” — went to state prison for a different 2005 armed robbery and auto theft. He was released in February 2009 on probation. Simms violated his probation when he was again arrested in June 2010, this time for robbery with a deadly weapon and selling cocaine. He pleaded guilty and Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Julio Jimenez sentenced him to one year in prison plus five years’ probation.But Simms served only one month because he had earned credit for time served earlier in a Miami-Dade jail. He was released in September 2010 on five years of court-mandated “administrative probation,” a low-level form of supervision that does not require regular check-ins with authorities. Simms hadn’t been out a month before he was again implicated in a violent act. According to Miami homicide detectives, Simms shot and killed Cornelious Larry, 27, on Oct. 16 in the parking lot of an Overtown apartment complex, 1535 NW First Pl. Miami police say Simms shot Larry to death after the man began yelling and cursing at Simms’ sister. Simms fled on a bicycle. Detectives searched for him for 12 days before Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Diane Ward signed an arrest warrant. The charges: first-degree murder and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Simms had been on the lam since.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. Shoot, rob, burglar, shoot, beat: get off free. Our highest law enforcement officials in the Department of Justice grandstand about “alternatives to incarceration” and “emptying the prisons.” Our sensitive academics whine endlessly about America the police state as if thugs like Johnny Simms aren’t getting away with murder after murder, abetted by lousy criminal fetishists festering in courtrooms until good cops end up in caskets.

February

Detective John Falcone

Detective John Falcone, Poughkeepsie, New York. Wrestled a three-year old from a man repeatedly charged with domestic violence who had hunted down her mother and killed her moments earlier. Thanks to Detective Falcone’s sacrifice, the infant survived.

Detective Falcone is survived by his parents.

March

Alain Schaberger

Alain Schaberger’s life began in Vietnam and ended when Officer Schaberger responded to a domestic violence call in Brooklyn, where a repeat felon with 28 prior arrests, mostly for robbery and burglary, pushed the young man over a railing to his death.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg referred to Schaberger as a “quiet, gentle soul” who dedicated his life to service. “Alain knew a lot about grief,” Bloomberg said of the former Naval officer who joined the NYPD in July 2001. “One of his first assignments as a police officer while he was still in the academy in the days after 9/11 was to go to checkpoints around Ground Zero and help the families who came there to cope with their horrific losses. He brought a lot of comfort to those people.” Addressing Schaberger’s family, including fiancée Shoshone Peguese, Bloomberg said, “I think he would tell you to remember not the last tragic moment of his life, but the many wonderful moments that came before it.”

Schaberger was a 10-year NYPD veteran who was born in Vietnam. He came to the U.S. when he was 5 years old with his father – an Army vet who worked as a civilian guard at the U.S. Embassy when Saigon fell in 1975 – and Vietnamese mother. Raised in East Islip, L.I., Schaberger grew up on tidy block of single-family homes and played basketball at the local public school. . . Schaberger often returned to East Islip to visit with his parents and sister, Tracey, a nurse with two kids, neighbors said. “It’s tragic. It’s unbelievable,” said neighbor Mitchell Greif. “He was a great guy from a good family. He was always pleasant and polite. His parents are devastated.” Schaberger’s mother – a hairdresser – and father were too distraught to speak with reporters. “It’s a shame,” said Bill Conley, 59, an electrician who has lived next-door to the Schaberger family for 25 years. “It’s always the good ones that die young.”

A policeman who died in the line of fire trying to save his sergeant’s life has been labelled a hero. Officer Jonathan Schmidt, from Trumann, Arkansas, shoved his superior out of harms way when a gunman unexpectedly opened fire during a routine arrest. He was able to return fire on Jerry Lard despite the fact he was shot in the neck and bleeding. The father-of-three then begged for his life. . . Schmidt worked as a night patrolman so he could spend days with his three children. He had a 12-year-old daughter and sons aged ten and 18 months. Schmidt recently received a commendation for saving an infant’s life by giving the child mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Trumann School District Superintendent, Joe Waleszonia said: ‘He wanted to clean up this community. He wanted it to be as safe for the community as it could be.

May

Kenneth Gary Vann

Sergeant Vann was assassinated while stopped at a red light: his patrol car was struck multiple times. A week later, the killer was caught by police. He had randomly chosen to kill officer Vann.

Sergeant Kenneth Gary Vann

[During the investigation] Detective Louis Antu, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office, said the mood was somber but dedicated at the command post Sunday. Many officers, including Antu and the sheriff, were out of town for the three-day Memorial Day weekend, when they were called back to Bexar County. “We’re not robots; we’re all taking time to reflect,” said Antu, who joined the Sheriff’s Office with Vann. “But it was a terrible killing, and everybody wants answers. We’re working for the family, to bring them justice.” Antu said the two men were “kids” when they joined the Sheriff’s Office. Vann was an excellent officer who loved his job and family, Antu said. Vann was married to sheriff’s Sgt. Yvonne Vann and leaves behind two sons, ages 19 and 15, and a daughter, 25, from a previous marriage, officials said. Ortiz was at his hunting lease in Rocksprings when he heard about Vann’s death. “We’re real saddened by the randomness of this incident; there’s really no rhyme or reason,” Ortiz said. “It’s very difficult because we don’t have anything new, but we’re not going to rest until we find the guy who did it.”

Whitestown, NY — Fresh out of high school in 2005, Kurt Wyman joined the Marine Corps Reserve. Activated in 2008, he served seven months in Iraq and won the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal. Wyman also became an Oneida County sheriff’s deputy in 2007. He rejoined the sheriff’s office when he returned from overseas. In 2010, he was rookie of the year. He twice was awarded the Sheriff’s Grand Cordon Medal, which recognizes outstanding achievement by a detail of officers. “His commitment not only to his country but to his county is second to none,” Sheriff Robert Maciol said. Wyman demonstrated his commitment to the ultimate degree Tuesday. The deputy, 24, was hit by a shotgun blast as he and two other officers tried to take an armed man into custody after a six-hour standoff in the rural town of Augusta. He died after being rushed to St. Elizabeth Medical Center.

Wyman left behind his pregnant wife, Lauren, their 18-month-old son, his parents and a sister.

A fallen police officer’s K-9 partner is now being honored. Fallen Terre Haute Police Officer Brent Long’s family cut the ribbon on Shadow’s Trail in Terre Haute. Shadow served alongside Officer Long on the force. The trail is beside Brent Long Memorial Way. It’s part of the expansion of the city’s trails and a way to honor the police dog’s service. “They did a good job for our department and to have Brent’s memorial way here and Shadow’s Trail right next to Brent, they’re partners even after Brent’s gone,” Terre Haute Police Chief John Plasse said.

August

Jeremy Henwood, San Diego

Jeremy Henwood, a captain in the Marine Corps Reserves and police officer for the San Diego Police Department, was shot and killed, Aug. 7. He had walked into a fast food restaurant to buy something to eat and also buy a meal for a 10-year-old boy who happened to cross his path. Moments later, while sitting in his patrol car, a man drove up beside him and fired the fatal shot. Henwood was 36.

Officer Henwood, moments before he was shot

Henwood served as an enlisted infantryman before going on to Officer Candidate School to receive his commission with the Marine reserves. The Canadian-born hero became a United States citizen in order to receive his commission with the Marines. He deployed twice to Iraq, and after his third deployment – this time to Afghanistan as a company commander with Combat Logistics Battalion 2 – Henwood returned to the U.S. in February to continue serving as a police officer with the SDPD. During the memorial ceremony, Henwood was posthumously promoted to the rank of major.

September

Lt. Joseph Sczcerba

18-year veteran New Castle, Delaware Lt. Joseph Sczcerba was stabbed to death while attempting to subdue a rampaging offender. Lt. Sczcerba and his wife performed volunteer work at a variety of places. His service to the community was memorialized by seventy local culinary school students who baked 10,000 cookies in his honor and delivered them to police officers. 6,000 people attended his funeral.

October

Derek Kotecki: His loyal canine wouldn’t leave his side after he was shot. He wanted a “noisy” funeral.

Patrolman Kotecki and K9 Benny

Lower Burrell, PA, Patrolman Derek Kotecki was shot and killed while investigating reports of a wanted man at a local fast food restaurant. The man was wanted for a shooting ten days earlier and for threatening police officers during the previous week. As Patrolman Kotecki and his canine, Benny, approached, the man suddenly opened fire. Patrolman Kotecki suffered a fatal wound. The subject then fled but was approached by other officers as he attempted to climb a fence behind the restaurant. He was killed during an exchange of shots with the responding officers. K9 Benny was uninjured but had to be muzzled after refusing to leave Patrolman Kotecki’s side.
Patrolman Kotecki had served with the Lower Burrell Police Department for 18 years. He is survived by his wife and two children.

Officer Thomas Babinsack, one of five people to eulogize Kotecki, said they had talked about the aftermath of such a situation while driving to a memorial service in April 2009 for three Pittsburgh officers gunned down in a SWAT siege. They discussed whether it was respectful to use their flashing lights and sirens in a funeral procession, and Babinsack said he’s since learned the protocol is to use lights but no sirens — which police vehicles observed on their way to Kotecki’s funeral. But Babinsack said Kotecki wanted something else. “Tom, I want you to promise me something: If something ever happens to me, I want everybody to know I was here,” Babinsack remembered Kotecki saying. “I want the fire trucks and police and ambulances going with lights on and sirens.” “He wanted a parade and he’s going to get one,” Babinsack said from the pulpit of the noisy funeral procession that was to follow.

Officer James Lowell Capoot, 45, of the Vallejo Police Department was killed in the line of duty on Nov. 17, 2011 in Vallejo, Calif. A loving and devoted father, husband, son, brother, uncle, officer, coach, neighbor and friend, Jim lived a full and extraordinary life. Born Nov. 2, 1966 in Little Rock, Ark., Jim attended local schools in Little Rock and graduated from John L. McClellan High School in 1985, where he was a distance runner on the cross country and track teams. Jim enlisted in the United States Marine Corps at age 18 and was stationed at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, where he met the love of his life, Jennifer Eileen DeCarlo. The two were married at St. Basil’s Catholic Church in Vallejo on Aug. 29, 1987. Jim left the Marines in 1989 but remained on Active Reserve through 1993. In 1990, he joined the California Highway Patrol and began his career as a peace officer. And, in 1993, he joined the Vallejo Police Department. For 19 years, Jim distinguished himself as a Vallejo police officer while endearing himself to the Vallejo community. He served as a motorcycle officer, motorcycle instructor, driving instructor and SWAT officer. He received two Vallejo PD Medals of Courage, one Life-Saving Medal and many other department commendations. And, in 2000, Jim received the Officer of the Year Award. Jim coached the Vallejo High School varsity girls basketball team and in his second year led the Apaches to a 25-7 record and a Sac-Joaquin Section Division II Championship. Jim left the Apache bench in March 2011 to bring into his home the two children of close friends who were killed in a motorcycle accident in January.

John David Dryer found his calling as a teenager when he nursed to health a horse that had become entangled in barbed wire. He turned his grades around, earned his veterinary science degree from Ohio State University, opened his own successful practice — and then became a police officer. . . . At home, Officer Dryer was a doting father to his autistic son, Benjamin. In an interview with the Post-Gazette in 2000 about training bloodhounds, he said his son gave him motivation. “My son Ben, who is 5, was very sick when he was born. In fact, a couple of times I thought I was going to lose him,” he said. “I think this is why I want to search for missing people, particularly children.”

December 21

Another Tampa Bay Cop in this bloody year: Arnulfo Crispin.

Since Crispin was shot the night of Dec. 18, [Carlos] Cortes and Officer Julio Ruiz have been by his family’s side, offering any assistance they could. Both officers learned more about their friend and why he always had a big smile on his face. “His family has been so humble and so giving,” Ruiz said. “They put people and family before themselves.” Cortes agreed. “It’s a large family and they don’t have that much,” he said. “At one point, they asked my wife and I to come and eat with them. They didn’t have a lot of food, but they made sure we had something to eat. They don’t have much, but what they do have they will give to others.” That mentality explained a lot about the officer they knew.

Crispin’s parents

Before leaving the family’s house Tuesday night, the officers gave the large family their phone numbers and promised to keep in touch. Although Crispin can’t be replaced, Ruiz said, the Crispin family has “gained 235 brothers and sisters at the Lakeland Police Department.”

December 29

Chicago Officer Clifton Lewis: “he took me in as his child”

The off-duty Chicago police officer slain in a West Side convenience store Thursday night had just gotten engaged on Christmas Day, family friends say. Clifton Lewis, 41, an eight-year veteran assigned to the Austin District’s tactical team, was pronounced dead Thursday at Stroger Hospital, officials said. Two men had walked into the M & M Quick Foods about 8:30 p.m. at 1201 N. Austin Blvd. in the Austin neighborhood, shot the officer, and then grabbed his gun and star and fled, sources said. . . . Lewis . . has received 81 commendations for his police work, had proposed to his girlfriend, Tamara Tucker, only after asking her 18-year-old son, Keyonta Thomas, for permission. On Christmas morning, Lewis pulled her son aside and asked for her “hand in marriage,” said Thomas, 18. “I am just at a loss for words,” said Thomas, who said he saw Lewis as a father. “He was just as a father (to me)… He took me in as his child.”

Addendum:Special Agent John Capano of the ATF was killed yesterday as I was writing this. He was on his way to pick up prescriptions for his ill, 81-year old father when he encountered an armed robbery at the pharmacy.

James Capano had planned to celebrate New Year’s Eve at his son’s house. The family is grieving the death of James Capano’s wife of 57 years, Helen Capano, mother of John Capano. She died of cancer on Dec. 18. James Capano said his son had volunteered to share his explosives expertise with military personnel in Iraq. “He knew what he was doing, and he was the best one they had,” James Capano proudly said. A tearful Rep. Peter Kingconsoled the elder Capano on the blood-stained sidewalk outside the pharmacy New Year’s morning. King’s wife was slain agent’s fourth grade teacher. “I’ve known John Capano for years,” King said, recalling giving Capano an award for bravery during a four-month tour of Iraq and Afghanistan. “He had a unique personality, a great personality,” King said. “Everybody loved him.”

Capano was the last officer killed in the line of duty in 2011, bringing the total to 163, 66 of which were gun killings. Thousands of other police were shot or attacked but survived.

Assassination-style killings — where assailants randomly shoot an officer or lie in wait for unsuspecting targets, are on the rise. Is cultural anger directed at police — by idiotic Occupy protesters, among others — contributing to an atmosphere in which police are targets? I think the vast majority of responsibility for the presence of dangerous offenders on our streets lies with the courts and civil rights activists who have succeeded in creating a consequence-free world for criminals. But every little bit of scapegoating counts. In 2012, it’s time to start speaking up for cops.

Tonya Segars has sent me information about the following potential miscarriage of justice in the death of Sarah M. Fennell. Please visit their site and sign the petition for more investigation of Sarah’s death.

Sarah M. Fennell

Imagine a world where the ABA and the vast constellation of human and civil rights groups bothered to make noise about victims once in a while. No, they’re too busy advocating for criminals.

Pacifica Radio aired Abu-Jamal’s commentaries after National Public Radio rethought an earlier decision to do so. Evergreen State College and Antioch College, among others, hosted the convicted murderer as a commencement speaker via audiotape. A Law & Order episode namedropped Abu-Jamal, with a character noting that the “Philadelphia journalist” was “framed for murder.” Rage Against the Machine played an infamous benefit concert for him.

And today, the Philadelphia Inquirer, which ought to know better, hijacked an editorial “remembering” Daniel Flynn to go off on a wildly inaccurate rant against the death penalty. How offensive, on an anniversary. When is enough enough?

Maureen Faulkner, widow of Daniel Faulkner, the officer killed by Mumia Abu Jamal 30 years ago tomorrow, has issued a statement about the decision to forego a re-sentencing hearing for Abu Jamal. Her statement is reproduced below: contrary to some media coverage, she did not agree quietly to the decision to release her husband’s killer from his death sentence. Instead, she has understandably lost all faith in the justice system, and she does not believe “Mumia” would ever really be executed.

The Faulkner family has been under continuous attack for three decades by an astonishing cabal of the malicious and the misinformed. Most in the media are assuming, wrongly, that Mumia’s followers will now drift off to other causes. There’s no chance of that happening. Amnesty International announced that appeals were continuing for Mumia. When Amnesty mentions “international fair trial standards” below, what they mean is that they will continue to try to impose United Nations laws on our country to aid cop-killers. From theAP:

Amnesty International, which maintains that Abu-Jamal’s trial was “manifestly unfair and failed to meet international fair trial standards,” said the district attorney’s decision [to remove Abu Jamal from death row] does not go far enough. Abu-Jamal still has an appeal pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court over the validity of ballistics evidence.

“Amnesty International continues to believe that justice would best be served by granting Mumia Abu-Jamal a new trial,” said Laura Moye, director of the human rights group’s Campaign to Abolish the Death Penalty.

It’s not really about the death penalty. Once that is abolished, not a single activist will go home. What do you think they’re going to do: announce that America is now a fair place and quit their jobs? No, they’ll continue to bleed our justice system dry until they overturn life-without-parole, and then move on every other sentencing rule that keeps killers and rapists off the streets. We’re in an arms race, and the anti-incarceration activists are winning, not least because we have to subsidize their activism in addition to defending against it.

Meanwhile, the Mumia cultists at Amnesty International issued a press release that calls law enforcement’s support for their fallen colleague “unseemly.” You’d think they could have been a bit more sensitive on the 30th anniversary of Daniel Faulkner’s murder. For the holidays, Amnesty’s also selling baby onesies, in case you want to turn your toddler into an advertisement for people who murder police:

“All Rights for All People.” How cute. Except cops, of course.

Here’s a whimsical poster from their gift catalog depicting a police officer clubbing a kid, $8:

And in case your adolescents are feeling too much pride over being American, here’s a tee-shirt for them, and a map that “turns the world upside down to challenge North-South perceptions”:

Don’t you feel less better now?

~~~

To get a taste of what Maureen Faulkner has gone through, there is a 1999 article written by her posted on the very interesting website, Pro-Death Penalty. Today, Faulkner posted the following statement on her own website. It’s damning. Too bad the media wasn’t interested in giving her space to say it, considering all the space they lavish on Abu Jamal’s claims:

Statement from Maureen Faulkner

After enduring 30 years of emotional and physical hell as I’ve suffered through the appeals process, I am now convinced that when a death sentence is at issue, the judges of the Federal District Courts and the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals simply do as they want, not as the law dictates. Judges Yohn, Scirica, Cowen and Ambro oppose the death penalty, so they shape the law to suit their personal needs. This isn’t just me venting. It’s a fact that’s supported by the numbers. The dirty little secret about the death penalty in Pennsylvania that nobody wants to come to grips with is that since the death penalty was re-instated by the U. S. Supreme Court in 1976, there have been hundreds of death sentences imposed by Pennsylvania juries. Yet, after three decades of trying, not a single one of them– including my husband’s case — has managed to successfully make it through the Federal appeals gauntlet. How is it possible that over the course of three decades all District Attorneys combined have gone 0 for several hundred on their appeals?

The disgusting reality with the death penalty in Pennsylvania is that the fix is in before the hearings even begin, and federal judges, including the 4 dishonest cowards who presided over my husband’s case, are the fixers.

My family and I have endured a three-decade ordeal at the hands of Mumia Abu-Jamal, his attorneys and his supporters; who in many cases never even took the time to educate themselves about the case before lending their names, giving their support and advocating for his freedom. All of this has taken an unimaginable physical, emotional and financial toll on each of us. Over the past few months, we have anguished over the two terrible options we are presented with. Should we choose a new sentencing hearing, it would undoubtedly take months to complete and come at an extreme cost to the citizens of Philadelphia. It will undoubtedly be a venue for every fringe group imaginable. Droves of sleazy Human Rights lawyerswill want to weigh in with amicus briefs. The list of character witnesses for Abu-Jamal would be a rouges gallery of the Hate America First crowd, and unlike he did at the 1982 sentencing hearing, this time around he will undoubtedly keep his vile mouth shut and portray the image of “a man filled with soulful humanity” as his former attorney once described him and not the seething animal he was at the 1982 hearing. The damning testimony of several key eyewitness who are now deceased will have to be read to the jury without emotion and the District Attorney will have the unenviable challenge of seating an impartial jury without being duped by even a single person who intends to nullify the death sentence. Should the jury decide on a death sentence again as they should, we would then start the whole decades-long appeals process over again, and we will be forced to repeat the past 30 years as if they never happened.

Given that we would be forced back into the same foul legal system that has failed us for so long and the morally dishonest judges we would undoubtedly be confronted with if there were a new sentencing hearing, we have asked Seth Williams to deny such a hearing and agree to have Mumia Abu-Jamal’s sentence be reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

This decision certainly does not mark the end of my journey, nor will I stop fighting to see justice done for my husband. Rest assured I will now fight with every ounce of energy I have to see that Mumia Abu-Jamal receives absolutely no special treatment when he is removed from death row. I will not stand by and see him coddled — as he has been in the past — and I am heartened by the thought that he will finally be taken from the protected cloister he has been living in all these years and begin living among his own kind; the thugs and common criminals that infest our prisons. I will hold any official who attempts to help Abu-Jamal improve his situation publicly and legally accountable for as long as I live.

In closing, I’d like to say that I believe the lowest dimension of hell has been reserved for child molesters and unrepentant murderers like Mumia Abu-Jamal. After 30 years of waiting, the time remaining before Abu-Jamal stands before his ultimate judge doesn’t seem quite so far off as it once did when I was younger. I look forward to that day, so I can finally close the book on this chapter of my life and live with the gratification and assurance that Mumia Abu-Jamal has finally received the punishment he deserves for all eternity.

I had my dog with me. A cattle dog, well-trained, loping like a wolf, loving the weirdness of being outside after dark. She’s a night girl like me. I’d been feeling deeply awful for days — flu, bronchitis, but suddenly the softness of the Florida air, and the warmth of November on the West Coast, and the dark brightness of lights rippling off water stirred some reserve in me and I was off like my lungs hadn’t been hacking up fluids for days, running like a bullet.

If only I had been a bullet.

I hadn’t gone a mile before some s***head in a truck pulled up and asked if I wanted a ride. What, me and my dog wanted a ride? Jogging on a sidewalk, we wanted a ride?

I have a hard time explaining this to some people. I don’t want to whine about men, or the state of the world, but it’s been years since I’ve felt safe enough to run before or after sunrise, which is the only time you can run outside much of the year where I live, and it’s been years since I’ve had a dog who could run at all, and I was being careful by going from house to house to house of people I knew, intentionally — from the folks who own the restaurant, to Yolanda’s, to Nancy’s, past the cop on the corner, to Conrad’s, to Bobby Nell’s, to James and Janelle’s, carefully so I felt some little sense that the night could belong to me and that I wasn’t taking anything that even resembled a risk, but there are crappy people everywhere, and often evidence of prostitution at the end of the road in the morning, and more than once a man pulled up by the waterfront down the street from my house in broad daylight even (how could it matter that much?), and then last night I was just feeling the night air and there he was: stupidity, threat, and unknown quantity pulling up out of the darkness.

So I leaned towards his rolled-down window and said to him in my calmest, most matter-of-fact voice:

“I’m going to cut you with broken glass.”

And he uttered objectionable sexist pejoratives and sped away. Under the circumstances, what else would he, or I, do?

I’ve always wanted to think that men like that would pause for a moment and just apologize for ruining the black soft asphalt smell, and the exuberance of sensing the stingrays and sharks and dolphins and manatees hovering in the rimming black water, and the ospreys and owls and squirrels hovering in the palmettos — that he might apologize for ruining all that hovering and quivering presence, which is what is really extraordinary about Florida.

But life isn’t like that. There just isn’t enough of Robert Herrick, seeing:

how amber through the streams
More gently strokes the sight
With some conceal’d delight

And so on.

Screw it. I’m tired of being afraid. Last night when I wrote this, this is the part where I expressed anger, and I took the section out, because as someone very wise once told me, someone who was nearly prosecuted for shooting a thug who was pistol-whipping him during an armed robbery as he tried to save his co-worker’s life . . . well, in the spirit of the comment itself I won’t say exactly what he said to me, but it’s true that one should never make a point of literally documenting one’s hand in writing.

Because I want to enjoy the soft beauty of the coastal Florida night. And I don’t want to upset my dog or frighten the neighbors, nor the manatees, who subsist on nothing harsher than lettuce and young mangrove shoots.

Ecosystems ought to be preserved. Women ought to be able to run at night.

I’ve had ecosystems on the mind lately, because so many people are trying to tear them down in the name of “rescuing” them. I’ve been thinking about how ironic it is that the protestors, whether on college campuses or city parks, are all so extremely naive about the ways they are being used by professional protestors — capital-A Anarchists, in every sense of the word — who are hell-bent on tearing down everything around them. They say they want to tear down “capitalism” but thanks to the Anarchists they’re really starting with attacking laws that are the only thing that stand between us and chaos.

They say they want “freedom of thought” and “freedom to go where they want,” but the very first thing the Occupy Anarchist puppet masters (as distinct from the ubiquitous Occupy puppeteers) did was silence and repress women by demanding that women do nothing about being raped at Occupy sites: thus the very first accomplishment of the Occupy movement has been to make it less possible for women to go where they want to go and experience the very freedom that is supposed to be the movement’s goal.

This is hardly accidental. I spent enough time on the Left to realize that the world’s worst most sexist creeps gravitate to extreme Leftist politics, and I spent enough time researching social movements of the past to realize that this condition is central to all revolutionary activism, not some aberration merely concurrent with the rise of bell bottoms.

Socialist creeps in the 19th century demanded that women practice free love to demonstrate their commitment to the cause of spreading socialism, just as Bill Ayers demanded the same of some girlfriend in an apartment in the 1960’s to prove her commitment to racial equality. 19th century anarchists like Charles L. Govan insisted that families and familial relations must be destroyed in favor of mutual philandering, the only true freedom to Govan and one given the predictably creepy name of “Voluntary Cooperation.”

Govan (on the left), practicing Voluntary Cooperation at Home Colony in Pierce County, Washington?

Look back to the late 19th Century and what you find there is a bunch of Anarchists saying things about sex and marriage that wouldn’t be out of place in the infamous “campus sex codes” established by feminists today, while simultaneously insinuating themselves in the larger American socialist movement with the explicit aim of using socialism’s tools to tear down capitalism’s house, then socialism’s house, then their own houses just to be consistent, until everyone would just wander around having Voluntary Cooperation with each other while the cows milked themselves.

You know, like the Occupy protestors.

I realized a long time ago that the utopia imagined by Leftists would not be the type of place where I could go running in the moonlight, whereas places created by the types of people who don’t feel the compulsion to make up disturbingly bloodless titles for stuff like “sex” are the ones who can be trusted to create the types of places where women can walk alone when they feel like it.

Behind all the infantile posturing and useful idiocy about to be unleashed on the United States over the next several months is one very ugly truth: these people want to create a world that is very much worse than this one. And despite the silliness of their visible facade, for the first time in my life I think the activists on the far Left are powerful enough to actually create real destruction. They have the institutions, having insinuated themselves in NGOs and government bureaucracies and especially throughout academia. They have the money, much of it from George Soros, which is why I think it’s so important to look at the ways he is trying to dismantle the American legal system by targeting policing, and courts, and elections.

The streets where I run used to be named after socialist heroes because the town I live in was founded as a socialist colony in 1911. But those people harbored a very real and healthy suspicion of itinerant anarchists who had managed to destroy other small socialist collectives in other states. So they survived, and evolved, through hard work, vigilance, religious faith, family values, and real voluntary cooperation, not the type that needs to be dictated to you by some bearded, wild-eyed ideologue. That’s why I can even think about running at night here, now.

Sort of gives a new meaning to the Department of Justice’s massive push to defund incarceration and subsidize Prisoner Re-Entry instead:

Detroit Police chief: Homicides spike 31%; overall crime down

Mark Hicks/ The Detroit News

Detroit— The Detroit Police Department’s crime figures released Monday for the third quarter show 23 more homicides compared to the same period last year, a 31 percent increase.

The latest crime figures show a nearly 19 percent hike in murders so far over 2010, with 301 homicides citywide through Sunday.

Overall crime is down about 7 percent from July 1 to Sept. 30, Police Chief Ralph Godbee said.

The department is having “a bear of a time getting our arms around” the widespread number of guns in the city, resulting in more violent conflicts, he told residents at the Breithaupt Career & Technical Center on the city’s west side.

Some of the homicides also involved suspects who were on probation for other previous crimes, said Inspector Dwane Blackmon of the homicide unit.

“It’s important to note those who are constantly causing havoc in the community… have been placed on probation,” he said.

Expect more of the same as well-funded activists fight to overturn two- and three-strikes laws and minimum mandatory sentencing, and California prepares mass early releases of prisoners.

Oddly, in Detroit, other types of crime are down. Or they may simply be being reported or recorded less. You can’t hide a body as easily as you can overlook other types of incidents. See here for a related post.

In other Detroit crime news, public bus drivers are still protesting dangerous conditions on the job:

Bus service in Detroit resumed Monday for the first full weekday since more than 100 drivers shut down the system for hours Friday morning, citing concern for their safety. The lack of bus service Friday prevented many Detroiters from making it to work or school on time. . .

Mayor Dave Bing ended the shutdown Friday by promising to use Detroit Police to heighten security, which pleased drivers and riders alike. Drivers were protesting an alleged attack on a colleague Thursday at the Rosa Parks Transit Center in downtown Detroit.

“It’s sad that that had to happen for us to get some attention,” said 20-year DDOT driver Charles Kimbrough. “We need help out here. We need help badly.”

Kimbrough, 44, had Friday off, but he wouldn’t have driven his bus if he had a shift. He stands in solidarity with the other drivers, and the alleged assault Thursday was the tipping point for drivers who feel unsafe because of criminal activity on DDOT buses.

“I know people that have been stabbed, spit on,” he said. “It ain’t nothing new to me.”

Asked how often he feels safe driving, Kimbrough quickly said, “Never.” Riders have put their hands on him, and he’s not allowed to carry a weapon for protection. He keeps the job to support his family.

There’s an easy solution for all of this: impose consequences for crime, instead of literally imprisoning everyone else in the city. It’s one or the other.

The state of Florida also hasn’t gotten around to resolving Martinez’ 2003 felony child abuse and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon charges. Apparently, the authorities are too busy doing other things.

So why does it take years to try a case in which the murderer confessed? The answer lies in the machinations of the defense bar, and the perverse, outsized power they wield over criminal procedure and admission of evidence in our courts. I don’t use the term perverse lightly — while the Florida Bar grandstands around the state pretending to examine problems of evidence that are either exceedingly isolated incidents or trumped-up claims by professional activists using fake statistics and faked “studies,” real problems that result in real denials of justice fester, unresolved — for many thousands of victims who will never receive justice as a result.

It would be nice if the Bar cared about that. They don’t.

Here is a record of the docket entries in one of Martinez’ current charges. Some entries are routine paperwork. Others represent the types of manipulation that defund the courts. Remember that most docket entries equal your money being spent in some way, large or small — and 155 docket entries into this murder case, there still hasn’t been a trial, just machinations and delays.

Martinez is also churning attorneys — another behavior designed to postpone trial, and a strategy frequently abetted by the defense attorneys themselves. Must be nice to have that sort of power over other people’s money — and the administration of justice.

Imagine that you are the parent of a murdered child, forced to witness this drawn-out manipulation of procedural rules. Bria’s family will likely be enduring this sickening game for the rest of their lives. In the eyes of our legal system, Aurelio Martinez is the victim now:

I’m also working on a project detailing Soros’ top grantees and what they do with their money. What does this have to do with crime? Soros subsidizes virtually every pro-criminal, anti-victim, anti-police action in this country, whether in the courts, the halls of government, or on the streets. I’ll be writing more about this in weeks to come. Meanwhile, you can see profiles of his top 25 grantees at the Soros Files Website.

One of the other speakers at the conference was Larry Grathwohl, who risked his life by infiltrating the Weather Underground and working undercover as an informant for the FBI when the Underground was busy carrying out murderous attacks on police and soldiers. I remember reading Larry’s book about the Weather Underground when I was in high school, at a time when terrorists like Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers were still revered as heroes in the lefty circles in upstate New York where I lived.

Now they’re just revered as heroes at places like Northwestern University, where Dohrn is a professor of law working to cripple our already-hobbled criminal justice system by imposing international “human rights” protocols on our courts.

Copies of Grathwohl’s book (written in 1976) are still bouncing around on the internet. He says he’s putting out a new edition soon — I hope so. Meanwhile, you can find a used copy on Amazon — but there’s literallyjust a few left.

Another speaker at the conference was Trevor Loudon, who runs the extraordinary KeyWiki site:

KeyWiki is a bipartisan knowledge base focusing primarily on corruption and the covert side of politics in the United States and globally. While particular interest is taken in the left, KeyWiki serves to expose covert politics on both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

Loudon lives in New Zealand, but he knows more about state level-elected officials in America than anyone I’ve met. Go figure. Check your own state legislators in the KeyWiki database — you might be surprised. Loudon is in the U.S. promoting his new book which documents Obama’s political and personal ties to radicals, communists and Marxists who openly seek to overthrow the American government: it’s called Barack Obama and the Enemies Within. Even ardent Obama supporters ought to be willing to give the evidence a fair hearing.

I was standing next to Larry Grathwohl outside the White House last week, after visiting the (sad, creepy, and malodorous) Occupy D.C., and it dawned on me that Larry’s book was probably the only negative accounting of the Weather Underground that had crossed my path until 2001, when Bill Ayers put his foot in the hornet’s nest with a stunningly offensive interview bemoaning the fact that he “didn’t do more” — didn’t set off more bombs and kill more people . . . an interview that was published in the New York Times on the morning of 9/11 and therefore perhaps the supremely ironic final read of some who perished in the Twin Towers that day.